[mcguire]

"Another user pointed out that Chef isn’t the only company to profit from working with ICE. Microsoft has raked in $4.6 million, IBM has received $1.6 million, and CISCO has received about $500,000 through their work with ICE."

Those numbers seem very low. Is this just for one year or one contract?

[thrower123]

The 4.6 million for Microsoft is just for Office 365 subscriptions, if I recall correctly.

[remarkEon]

Does each government agency have to individually enter into a contract with Microsoft et al.? That sounds wildly inefficient and silly. My guess is that this "user" pulled those numbers out of thin air.

[kube-system]

The purpose of a contract isn’t to be efficient with paperwork or describe a high-level view of transactions. It’s a document that very granularly describes those transactions.

Any large organization has many people with the authority to spend money, and each one of those transactions will be supported by a contract.

[mcguire]

Yes. Mostly.

The contracts are generally for specific products or services, for a specific time. High-level agencies have a great deal of autonomy and also get to pull their needs out of their own budgets. Lower-level elements within an agency (a NASA center, for example) can also have more or less autonomy.

[remarkEon]

Yeah I shouldn't been more clear in my question. I was more referring to high-level services (e.g. Office). For specific use-cases, it makes sense for lower level agencies to have at least a little autonomy.